Harvest Free: One Person, Two Projects, History Intact
Two active projects sounds brutal until you read the word active. Your history is untouched, and archiving is how you stay inside the line.
On this page
On paper, Harvest has one of the tightest free tiers in time tracking: one person, two projects. Next to Clockify's five users it reads like a demo rather than a plan.
Read the wording properly and it is better than it looks — and for a particular kind of freelancer, it is close to ideal.
The word is "active"
The limits are 1 active person and 2 active projects.
And then the sentence that changes everything: "Everything you've already tracked stays in your account."
So this is not a cap on how much work you can do or how much history you can keep. It is a cap on how many things are live at once. Archive a finished project and it stops counting; the hours you logged against it remain, reportable, in your account.
A freelancer who runs two client engagements at a time and archives each one when it completes can use Harvest free indefinitely, with years of accumulated history, and never touch the limit.
That is a materially different product from the one "two projects" suggests.
Where it genuinely does not work
Be clear about the shape it excludes, because for those people it is not close.
Three or more concurrent clients and you are archiving and unarchiving projects to get work done, which is friction every single day rather than once a quarter.
Any second person. One active person is a hard line. A subcontractor you use occasionally, a partner, an assistant tracking their own hours — none of that fits, and there is no partial accommodation.
Retainer work with many small ongoing projects, where everything is always slightly active, is a poor fit for the archive-when-done rhythm the plan assumes.
You have to shrink first
This catches people who assume a downgrade simply applies.
To qualify for the Free plan you must:
- Archive projects until two or fewer are active.
- Remove people until one remains.
- Disable SAML.
The account has to fit inside the plan before the plan becomes available. That is work, and on a busy account it is more work than it sounds — you are making decisions about twenty projects at a moment when you are trying to reduce costs quickly.
Do it before your trial expires rather than during the restricted period afterwards.
Integrations disconnect
Switching to Free disconnects integrations including Asana, Deel and QuickBooks, and clears sample data.
The QuickBooks one is the one to think about. If your time entries have been flowing into accounting automatically, that stops, and the replacement is manual. Nothing is lost, but a pipeline you had stopped thinking about now needs your attention every month.
Work out what that costs you in time before deciding the free plan is the cheaper option. For some people it is genuinely cheaper; for others the monthly hour of manual reconciliation is worth more than the subscription.
If the trial already ended
When a trial expires without a paid plan, time tracking and most daily features are restricted — but Reports and Settings remain accessible.
That matters, and it is the right design. You cannot keep working, and you can still see and extract what you tracked. Nobody is holding your hours hostage to force a decision.
Harvest also notes that if a trial has been expired for more than 30 days, a self-serve option may let you add 14 more days — useful if you got distracted and want to evaluate properly rather than under pressure.
Harvest or Clockify?
The two free tiers restrict completely different things, which makes the choice unusually clean:
| Harvest Free | Clockify Free | |
|---|---|---|
| People | 1 active | 5 active including owner |
| Projects | 2 active | Not limited in the same way |
| History | Kept in full | Reports capped at 31-day range |
| CSV export | Not documented in the pages we checked | Paid plans only |
| Billable rates | Not documented in the pages we checked | Removed from Free |
Roughly: Harvest restricts breadth, Clockify restricts depth. If you work alone on a couple of things at a time and want your full history reportable, Harvest's shape suits you. If you need several people tracking and can live with month-by-month reporting, Clockify's does.
Either way, the records need to live somewhere that is not the tool — which records to secure before you switch covers what that means in practice.
Questions people ask
What are the Harvest free plan limits?
One active person and two active projects, with limited integrations. The word doing the work is active: archived projects do not count against the limit, so a freelancer juggling two live engagements at a time can run indefinitely on the free plan.
Do I lose my old time entries on the Harvest free plan?
No. Harvest states "Everything you've already tracked stays in your account". The restriction is on how many projects and people are active, not on your history, which is a meaningfully better deal than it first appears.
What do I have to do before moving to the Harvest free plan?
Archive projects until two or fewer are active, remove people until only one remains, and disable SAML. It is a prerequisite rather than something that happens automatically - the plan is not available to you until the account fits inside it.
Will switching to free break my integrations?
Yes. Harvest documents that switching disconnects integrations such as Asana, Deel and QuickBooks, and clears sample data. If your invoicing or project workflow depends on one of those connections, that is the piece to replace before you switch rather than after.
What happens when a Harvest trial ends without upgrading?
Time tracking and most daily features are restricted, while Reports and Settings remain accessible. So you can still see and extract what you tracked during the trial, which is the window to use if you are deciding whether to stay.
Where this information comes from
Product details change often. Each item below links to the primary source we checked, so you can confirm anything that matters to your decision.
Spotted something out of date or incorrect? Tell us and we will fix it.